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December 08, 2008

When Hindus mourned a Muslim martyr

Today or tomorrow, depending on the sighting of the moon, is Eid al-Adha, a day of celebration for Muslims worldwide. This year, December is also the month of Muharram, a religious event of lament and mourning observed by the Shia Muslim sect.

I recently finished reading The Girl From Foreign by American documentary film maker Sadia Shepard which I had previewed here a few months ago. Shepard's journey in search of her Indian born Jewish/ Muslim grandmother's roots crisscrosses through western India and the Pakistani city of Karachi. It is a fascinating story which I plan to describe at a later date. Today however, I wish to bring up a little known fragment of Indian history that had laid buried in my memory for decades and which an anecdote in Shepard's book helped shake loose.

The student population of my school in New Delhi was composed of girls from practically every part of India belonging to several different linguistic groups and religions. Nearly fifty percent of the Punjabi and Bengali students came from families who had lost their ancestral homes in the partition of India in 1947, my own being among them. In middle school, a class mate whose folks had moved to India from the Pakistani city of Lahore, once casually commented that her father's family used to observe Muharram in their hometown before the partition. At the time I didn't think much of what my friend had said. We were young and many of us had heard interesting pre-partition tales from our parents. It is only now, on thinking back, that her story acquires a special meaning and given the subsequent deterioration in Hindu-Muslim relations in general and between India and Pakistan in particular, also a certain amount of poignancy. You see, the remarkable thing about my friend's Muharram story was that she was not a Muslim, but a Hindu Brahmin.

My class mate belonged to the Punjabi community of Dutts, in more communally harmonious times also known as the Hussaini Brahmins. They, along with their Shia Muslim friends and neighbors, used to commemorate and grieve the deaths of Imam Hussain and his disciples in the bloody battle of Karbala during the 7th century power struggle among early Muslims. Of the Dutts was said the following:

Wah Dutt Sultan,Hindu ka DharamMusalman ka Iman,

WahDutt SultanAdha Hindu Adha Musalman

[Oh, Dutt the king,follows the religion of the HinduAnd the faith of the Muslim.

Oh, Dutt the king, He is half Hindu, half Muslim.]

I do not bring up my friend's story in any specially sentimental way. Looking back on her simply told tale with the political events of today as the backdrop, evokes more wonder than sorrow. I was born a few years after the tumultous partition of India. The political and psychological wounds of that cataclysmic event were raw on both sides of the divide during my childhood. Yet amazingly enough, there probably was more mutual understanding between the two battling communities then than there is today. After decades of mistrust and alienation, the line in the sand that was drawn across Hindu and Muslim identities around 1947, has now hardened and appears set in concrete. As one of the linked articles explains in its somewhat flowery text:

The Hussaini Brahmins, along with other Hindu devotees of the Muslim Imam, are today a rapidly vanishing community. Younger generation Hussaini Brahmins are said to be abandoning their ancestral heritage, some seeing it as embarrassingly deviant. No longer, it seems, can an ambiguous, yet comfortable, liminality be sustained, fuzzy communal identities giving way under the relentless pressure to conform to the logic of neatly demarcated ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ communities. And so, these and scores of other religious communities that once straddled the frontier between Hinduism and Islam seem destined for perdition, or else to folkloric curiosities that tell of a bygone age, when it was truly possible to be both Hindu as well as Muslim at the same time.

I am not a starry eyed optimist. I harbor no illusions that the complicated politics of the Indian subcontinent are going to be solved simply by harping on the feel-good history of shared culture - of food, music, language, ethnicities and sometimes even religious celebrations. Nonetheless, those who have turned the region into a powder keg of hostilities and have fueled communal fires with lies and revisionist history, need to be reminded perhaps, that if the present mayhem is always the consequence of past injustices, there are also many examples of peaceful co-existence that could serve as the model for reconciliation between south Asian Muslims and Hindus.

Eid Mubarak to our Muslim readers and to any one else who may wish to rejoice with their Muslim friends on this day.

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Comments

If not feel good of a shared culture, certainly common sense. The election outcome of five states that went to the polls, some after the Mumbai mayhem indicates that the voter was not swayed by shrill anti-terrorism rhetoric which often has an anti-Muslim edge.
People have begun to realise that institutional change is what matters not wild-eyed rhetoric and promises.
Among the 163 people who died in Mumbai, some 33 were Muslims. If the terrorists hoped to create a Hindu-Muslim divide they clearly failed. Indeed there was no Hindu-Muslim tension during or after the attack. The Muslims of Mumbai don't even want to allow the 9 dead terrorists space in their grave-yards. Why should they ?

While I agree that the mutual understanding and cooperation between the two communities existed in the past at certain levels like commerce, politics, religion,arts and literature the previous barriers of sharing food and social intermingling among the two communities is much less rigid now. Indians of all communities now have more opportunities to interact with each other from a very young age in schools, colleges and at work place.

Would you then say that the understanding between Indian Hindus and Muslims is better now than it was in our parents' generation or even yours and mine? I am actually thinking more about all classes of Indians, not just the college educated group.

I find that within the Indian community in diaspora, intermingling is far less. The Indian American community is segregated along religious and regional lines. Groups like Gujarati Americans, Sikh Americans, Bengali Americans etc. are generally more cohesive than say, an umbrella organization like *Indian Americans* which would include people from different regional and religious backgrounds. Since the 1990s particularly, I have seen more social rigidity when it comes to religion. Indian American Hindus and Sikhs tend to interact quite freely. But Indian American Muslims are more likely to join social and cultural groups with Pakistani and Bangladeshi Americans.

many thanks for the mubarkabadis and for sharing this. i am adding an excerpt of this blog and some from yoginder sikands post to baithak along with two links that i had posted earler...one from ToI and the other from a column by short story writer intezar hussain

The interaction between Bengali Hindus and Muslims was more general and did not stay within the confines of any sect. It was broader. I come from a muslim background. Though my mother would disapprovingly murmur a comment on what was the need for her son to perform in the Arati with his Hindu classfriend during Durga Puja in the late fiftys, she would have no problems when her son---so inept in math would take his algebra book and notepad to ask Saraswati to bless.

Many thanks for this moving piece. But I would only like to add that notwithstanding the troubled times we live in, even as communal attitudes and acrimony grows, Dutt Sultans also emerge precisely under such circumstances. Basically life is simply too precious to be destroyed by human folly. Truth, goodness and beauty cannot be effaced.

What I was referring to is that while there has been a rise of strident communal politics in India, at a social level the ritualistic barriers practised mainly by the elite and the educated of both communities are breaking down.
In the Indian context, in the pre partion era the practitioners of communal politics were restricted to the upper class and the college educated. The working class,artisans and the peasantry remained largely unaffected.This has continued to be generally so even after partition though the bloodbath of the partition, and other factors like the deteriorating relation between India and Pakistan have given the oportunity to the communal parties to expand their base. The frequent communal riots, the rath yatra, the destruction of the Babri masjid, the pogrom in Gujarat are the handiwork of political parties who are still financed by the rich and the middle class. Therefore, while the communal situation is quite serious, the majority of Indians do not subscribe to the views propounded by these political parties.

Thanks, Aku. I understand what you are saying and my own take on the matter of social intermingling is similar to what you say. I am referring more to the political atmosphere in which communities (not just Hindus and Muslims) are becoming increasingly polarized and parochial in their approach. It is a very selfish way to run a nation.

My fear though is that while the majority of Indians, Hindus and Muslims, do not subscribe to the extremist / separatist point of view, the political climate of divisiveness created by the hardliners has made the "normal" people afraid to speak up. So the high profile cases of discrimination and violence set the stage for national dialogue rather than the sane voices of the moderate majority. Politics of fear has always been the modus operandi of fascist forces. India needs a bold and honest leadership at the national level around which the majority of the peaceful citizens can rally to shut up the angry voices at the extreme fringes. Until that happens we'll only see escalating violence, intimidation and alienation.

I wonder about the etymology and significance of the name "Dutt". I grew up with a Sikh friend with the surname Dutta, which, at the time, I thought was exclusively a Bengali name. Later, my mother pointed out a girl to me saying that "she had been given away in dutt" - the custom, she explained, of a couple giving away a newborn to close relatives who were childless. My Hindi dictionary confirms this with the meanings "given / made over / a gift / an adopted son / one who has 'given himself'". Was this a universal Hindu or Indian custom? Was it also a Muslim tradition? Any other interpretations?

Incidentally, my friend alienated me in middle age, a few years after the Hindu-Sikh problems, by reviling me for being a Hindu and therefore a godless person with no firm exclusive beliefs. His American Jewish wife threw in "idolator" for good measure - something I learnt was the lowest form of insult from a Jew. No wonder we cluster together defensively! I have grown to distrust the identifier "Indian" as an abstraction, and the terms "Indian-American", "Hindu-American", etc. laughably oxymoronic in comparison with say "Irish-American".